There's a world of weirdness out there if you know where to look - and the internet is a great place to start. Here's our round-up of the wackiest stories on the web today.

A 72-year-old Chinese man is acting as a model for his granddaughter's fashion range - for women. Fashion designer Lyu Ting says her grandfather Liu Qianping recently visited her when she had just received a new consignment of clothes. She comments: "When unpacking the boxes, he casually put on one piece - and I and my staff all thought it was a great match." Liu, who says he had never tried on women's clothes before, was also apparently quite taken with how he looked.

A plague of mutant “super rats” has invaded the upmarket town of Henley-on-Thames, the host of the annual Royal Regatta, a new study has disclosed. Researchers found the picturesque riverside Oxfordshire area has been inundated with dozens of the pests, which carry a poison-resistant gene. Having migrated from parts of Berkshire and Hampshire, the brown rats, and their life-threatening diseases, are spreading after being found on several unidentified farms.

These adorable baby red pandas almost jumped out of their fur when a zoo keeper crept up to surprise them. This hilarious video shows them contently eating a meal until someone gives them quite a fright, causing one of the babies to jump and fall before scurrying off. And like a video of a panda sneezing in its enclosure, which has generated more than 40million online views, these pandas in Maruyama Zoo in Hokkaido, Japan, are proving popular with more than 460,000 views in just five days.
And this brief video of a tiny panda making a big noise - and making its mother jump in the process - is also delighting panda fans worldwide.

Forty- and fifty-somethings in the throes of a mid-life crisis should probably stop blaming a troubled marriage, their kid's college costs, or technology that makes them feel about as modern as papyrus compared to their younger colleagues. A new study finds that chimpanzees and orangutans, too, often experience a mid-life crisis, suggesting the causes are inherent in primate biology and not specific to human society. "We were just stunned" when data on the apes showed a U-shaped curve of happiness, said economist Andrew Oswald of the University of Warwick in England and a co-author of the paper, which was published on Monday in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the USA.

A Santa Claus was left dangling from the ceiling after his beard became trapped while abseiling inside a Reading shopping centre as part of a Christmas lights switch-on show. He was stuck for about 30 minutes about 15ft off the ground in the Broad Street Mall on Saturday afternoon. Eyewitness Ryan Gaudreau said: "Everyone was laughing at him - he didn't really know what to do." Stephanie Maynard, marketing manager at the centre, said Santa was not hurt.

Journalists on Rihanna's plane to cover her latest tour complain the singer is hiding from them - with one reporter staging a protest streak down the aisle. The tour takes in seven countries in seven days to promote new album Unapologetic - but halfway through it has reportedly descended into "chaos" and "anarchy". As the tour started, there were numerous pictures of Rihanna partying with the passengers - but journalists now claim that has all stopped and the singer is hiding from them in an onboard 'panic room'. Jason Newman, a senior writer at Fuse magazine, said passengers had gone "into revolt mode", with reporters yelling: "Occupy 777".